ABA Family Legal Guide

Health-Care Law

Specific Issues in Health Care

Abortion

How did abortion become legal?

p>Until the early 1970s, about two-thirds of the states banned abortion except when it was necessary to save a mother's life. The other states had similar laws, but allowed for a few other instances when women could seek an abortion, such as when the pregnancy was the result of incest or rape.

In 1973, in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that women have a fundamental right to have an abortion. In that case, a single pregnant woman (who appeared under the pseudonym "Jane Roe") brought a lawsuit against the state of Texas. A Texas law made abortion illegal except in situations where the mother's life was at stake. The Court decided that the Constitution guarantees you a right to privacy from state interference, which includes whether you decide to have an abortion. The decision remains highly controversial to this day.

Before abortion became legal, an estimated 1.2 million women sought illegal abortions each year. Unlicensed persons who were not doctors performed many of these abortions. The conditions were often unsanitary and women were at high risk of infection, hemorrhage, disfiguration, and death. Whiskey sometimes was used as an anesthetic.

At the same time, the fact that such laws were in place no doubt limited the number of abortions performed.

In the words of the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in a case decided in 2000, "Millions of Americans believe that life begins at conception and consequently that an abortion is akin to causing the death of an innocent child; they recoil at the thought of a law that would permit it. Other millions fear that a law that forbids abortion could condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity, depriving them of equal liberty and leading those with least resources to undergo illegal abortions with the attendant risks of death and suffering. [These are] virtually irreconcilable points of view. . . . "